Surrey Police Failed to Investigate Dowler Hacking, IPCC Says

U.K. police in 2002 failed to
investigate whether News Corp.’s now defunct News of the World
tabloid hacked the mobile phone of murdered school girl Milly
Dowler while a search for her was under way.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said former
senior officers at Surrey Police were “afflicted by a form of
collective amnesia” in relation to the phone-hacking
allegations.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the
World in July 2011 in response to public anger over the scandal
that erupted on the discovery that the tabloid accessed the 13-
year-old’s voice-mail messages. Six journalists at the paper,
including former editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, were
charged in relation to the Dowler case last year.

“We will never know what would have happened had Surrey
Police carried out an investigation into the hacking of Milly
Dowler’s phone in 2002,” Deborah Glass, IPCC Deputy Chair, said
in a statement on its website. “Phone hacking was a crime and
this should have been acted upon, if not in 2002, then later,
once the News of the World’s widespread use of phone hacking
became a matter of public knowledge.”

While the IPCC, a police watchdog, criticized Surrey
Police, it said it wouldn’t seek to punish two officers for
misconduct.

Police in Surrey said in a statement that the Dowler probe
was the most high-profile investigation in the country in 2002
and remains the largest undertaken by the law-enforcement
agency that covers an area south of London.

“At the time Surrey Police became aware of phone hacking,
the focus of the investigation team was on finding Milly Dowler
and then bringing her killer to justice,” Surrey Police Chief
Constable Lynne Owens said. “It was right that Milly was the
primary focus of the investigation, but the matter of phone
hacking should have been revisited at a later stage.”

Mary Kearney, a spokeswoman at News Corp. (NWSA)’s News
International unit in London, said the company had no comment.